Source · Select Committees · Health and Social Care Committee
Recommendation 9
9
Accepted in Part
Create plan to rebuild health visitor workforce and recruit at least 1000 additional staff.
Recommendation
The Government must create a specific plan to rebuild the health visitor workforce in its forthcoming NHS Long Term Workforce Plan. This plan must be informed by safe staffing tools to ensure that health visitors have a manageable workload. As an initial step, we call on the Government to immediately commit to recruiting at least another 1000 health visitors. (Recommendation, Paragraph 56)
Government response summary AI-generated
The government confirmed the 10 Year Workforce Plan will include a phased delivery roadmap for health visiting services to address workforce pressures. However, they rejected committing to recruiting a specific number of new health visitors, stating it would not be responsible to fix precise workforce numbers a decade into the future.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Government Response
Accepted in Part
HM Government · verbatim extract
Accepted in Part
We agree that the child health workforce - including midwife and health visiting teams - are central to how we support families. Their contact with parents, carers and children of all ages provides vital advice and support and helps ensure that health, development and safeguarding needs are identified early. We are committed to strengthening health-visiting services so that all families have access to high-quality, personalised support. This objective will be met through long-term sustainable reform in light of the forthcoming 10 Year Workforce Plan. This will set out how the health workforce will support delivery of the reforms in the 10 Year Health Plan, including its proposed system shift to prevention. We are working through how the plan will articulate the changes for different professional groups. Our 10 Year Health Plan committed to a professional strategy for nursing and midwifery, which is expected to be published in spring 2026. This strategy will set out a professional direction of travel, up to 2040, for all England’s nurses, midwives and nursing associates. We cannot commit to a specific number at this stage, but we are working closely with regions in relation to the current challenges for releasing staff to fill commissioned training places. It is our intention to improve the capacity of health-visiting services, including through the development of a safe staffing tool, which will be developed over the next few years.
Read the full response on Parliament ↗